Fat Jedi and RPGs

I've been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic for a few days now, and I've been browsing through the comments on Facebook and various forums. Beneath the inevitable noise level of big launch angst over wait queues and imperfect systems, there is an interesting difference of opinion between the hard-core World of Warcraft damage counters and those players looking for a multiplayer roleplaying game.

To establish my bias, I started roleplaying with pencil and paper and dice, then joined Everquest shortly after its release in 1999. I have pretty much been sending subscription fees to one or more MMO's ever since. However, I have never kicked anyone from a group because their damage wasn't high enough or they didn't have the choreography of a boss battle memorized ahead of time.

Somewhere in the few years between Everquest and release of World of Warcraft in 2004, the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG) lost its roleplaying and became just an MMO. Roleplaying came to mean choosing one of a predetermined set of player classes and learning to play them well (in a mechanical sense), whereas it once meant imbuing your character with some personality. Online roleplaying sessions went from occasional combat bridged with witty banter and repeated character schticks to monotone technical commands from raid leaders directing the equivalent of complicated football plays designed by the uber-guilds that preceded us in battle.

When I look at the recent comments about SWTOR, it seems the polarization of the play styles is complete. I see complaints from the serious WoW defectors about how bad the Imperial Agent class is, with it's resistance to a clean rotation of damage abilities and consequently lower damage per second. Yet my friends who have tried many classes tend to agree that the Imperial Agent storyline is one of the most interesting, and fun. Bioware really thinks that matters - like it did in the Knights of the Old Republic games that led to SWTOR.

But I know this is a losing battle. Old-school roleplaying requires creativity, and a lot of energy, on the part of the players. And to be fair, it often just doesn't work. The death knell of roleplaying for me was the release of Dungeons and Dragons version 4.0, the successor to the paper and pencil game that started all of this. Coming full circle and recognizing the orders of magnitude revenue difference between it and its computerized descendants, the new Dungeons and Dragons rules take many ideas from World of Warcraft. Its designers have turned a roleplaying game into a tabletop combat game with most opportunities for out-of-combat roleplaying removed. Oh well.

My character in SWTOR? He's Xulee - a Jedi Consular with Asian features, a bad haircut, and a naive goody-goody attitude that will gradually sicken all of his friends. Oh, and he's fat. Quite fat and proud of it. I haven't measured his DPS, but it probably sucks.

Fat Jedi!

Street View Roleplaying

I stumbled upon an amazing new tool for running roleplaying games in a modern setting – Google Street View.

To test some new roleplaying rules, I’ve been running a post-apocalypse adventure set in and around Washington D.C. Almost everyone in the world had been wiped out by a mysterious disease, and the players were among the few survivors trying to rebuild society in the Arlington suburbs. The players had a paper street map of the area, but I started using Google Maps on my laptop to figure out where their travels were taking them. When they asked where they could find a sporting goods store, I just asked Google, and when they went to a local 7-11 store to scavenge food, I went to Street View and showed them what the place looked like.

“I want to check out that van in the parking lot,” one of the players said. He was playing a homeless character named Skinny Pete who was very happy about the apocalypse because now he could have whatever home he wanted. Skinny Pete was also an alcoholic and had a habit of breaking into abandoned cars to see if there was any liquor in the trunk.

I let him break into the van, and we used the Internet to look up the “AM-Liner” name on the side. We found out it belonged to a local Virginia company that specialized in “quality full service sanitary sewer and manhole rehabilitation” – no liquor back there.

This started an unspoken rule that if it showed up in Street View it was actually there in the game. Over the next few sessions the players used Street View to design better defenses for their commandeered home, discover an “abandoned” Pepsi delivery truck at the gate to Fort Myer, and "rescue" two dogs from a kennel in the neighborhood. They even went on line to see what cars a local dealer had in stock and found a nice Black Jeep Grand Cherokee that his since taken quite a beating.

For me, as the gamemaster, Street View has become a great way to inject real detail, and in some cases new story lines, into the game – that is until my laptop battery dies.

The Liquorless AM-Liner Van in Post-apocalypse Arlington

It Came from Wisconsin

I was in High School in the late '70s when Dungeons and Dragons crawled from a dark corner of Wisconsin where it had slowly been molting and growing into an entirely new kind of game, unlike anything anyone had seen before. It had clawed its way into small hobby shops and onto college campuses, but the disappearance of Michigan State student James Dallas Egbert III drew it fully out into the open to spawn a multi-billion dollar gaming industry. Egbert's disappearance was erroneously blamed on a real life adaptation of the game acted out in the campus's steam tunnels, and it made national news.

Dungeons & Dragons was the creation of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson - a complex game played with paper and pencil and lots of different dice. From the start it contained all the basic elements that still power role playing games like the massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft.

I met Gary in 1979 when I was writing a paper about Dungeons & Dragons for a high school composition class. I cornered him in the men's room at a small convention that winter in Lake Geneva, WI, and asked him a couple questions about the game. Somehow, between writing the paper and getting it back from the teacher, I had forgotten that my overall thesis was that Gary didn't deserve all the credit for the game (his was the only name on the advanced version books) and that many of the key ideas came from Dave Arneson. My teacher suggested I send a copy to Gary, and without rereading it, I did just that. He responded with a three page letter he had typed himself, explaining everything I'd gotten wrong. I think I made him mad.

Years later I met Gary again at Gen Con, a game convention he and his friends started in 1968 that now draws over 35,000 attendees every summer and fills up half of the hotel rooms in downtown Indianapolis. Later, through a strange twist, I also ended up subbing as Germany in an online game of Diplomacy in which Gary played Russia. I never mentioned the paper the stupid kid wrote back in 1979. I have since discovered that Dave Arneson filed suit against Gygax that same year and by 1981 was once again listed as the games co-creator.

If you've ever played a game where your chose a class for your character, had ability scores, hit points, received experience points, or gained levels, take a moment to silently thank Gygax and Arneson. Unfortunately, it's too late to thank them in person. Gary passed away in 2008, followed by Dave in 2009.

Cover of the First D&D Book I Owned. Still Gives me Chills.

Fiction Tourists

In April of 1995, David West Reynolds, a Ph.D. candidate from the University of Michigan, traveled to Tunisia to rediscover all the old Tatooine set locations from the first Star Wars film. Armed with photos he'd taken of the movie on his television, rough ideas of locations and towns, and some vital factoids printed on the back of the Star Wars cards he'd collected as a kid, Reynolds was able to locate most of the old sites and a few pieces of the sets. In one case, a local farmer had used the evaporators from Luke's home to build a chicken coup.

Later that year, Star Wars Insider magazine published "Return to Tatooine," Reynolds' account of his journeys. His adventured ignited passions for similar "Star Wars Archeology" expeditions in hundreds of fans. Small groups of a new sort of Fiction Tourist scoured Tunisia, as well as the redwood forests and southwest deserts of the U.S., searching for artifacts.

A decade later, thousands of fans of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy were flying halfway around the world to tour the sets in New Zealand. Companies sprang up to organize package tours and a few are still going strong.

Fiction Tourism centered around big budget, blockbuster movies may be relatively new, but literature has inspired people to visit specific settings for much longer. How many travelers have gone looking for 221B Baker Street, walked through the moors of Bronte Country, or paid someone on a Dublin street corner for a James Joyce tour? How many beatniks spent their last dollar on gas in the 1960s to retrace Jack Kerouac's transformative path across America?

I just read about the Star Wars Archeology phenomenon in an article in the March 2009 edition of Harpers (Yes, I'm a little behind on my magazine reading) and it started me wondering if I might be a Fiction Tourist.

My wife and I have discussed a trip out East, and I've thought about stopping in Providence and visiting some of H.P. Lovecraft's haunts - but that would be more to get a sense of the author, not his fictional creations.

Ah, but I am a Fiction Tourist! I remember now. In April of 2006 my family traveled in England. We started in Bath, then rented a car and drove up through the Cotswolds into northern Wales. I made sure our route took us through Shrewsbury. We stopped, and there I stood among what remains of the Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, in the very spot where one of my favorite fictional characters lived - Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael. I even have a pamphlet entitled "In the Footsteps of Brother Cadfael," with a map that notes all the places mentioned in the books. It's no Tatooine Evaporator, but it does fit nicely on my bookshelf.

Real Me and the abbey of Fictional Cadfael

"Return to Tatooine" by David West Reynolds, Star Wars Insider #27
"Raiders of the Lost R2" by John Mooallem, Harper's, March 2009
Star Wars Locations, H.P. Lovecraft Sites, In the Footsteps of Brother Cadfael